What Is On Your Customer Relationship Management Wishlist?

At my day job, we have been looking into the possibility of getting a new ticketing system. We have passed the RFP (request for proposal) deadline and are evaluating the submissions. One of the areas we are really focusing on is customer relationship management (CRM) features because keeping track of all the ways a person interacts with us is increasingly important…and increasingly difficult.

This whole process reminded me of an article that caught my eye last summer, Why Nonprofits Deserve CRM Innovation. Author Gabe Cooper’s central thesis is that there is nearly $340 billion in donations being directed toward non-profits annually, yet the available CRM tools are oriented toward business sales rather than building relationships that connect with a donor’s passions.

“Charities and social enterprises face growing pressure to cut through marketing clutter and connect personally with younger Millennial donors. Their software can no longer afford to see donors as “leads” or “transactions”; instead, they must focus on the personal passions of each giver.”

He identifies five areas in which improvements to CRM will benefit non-profits.

Generosity-specific predictive data analytics. Nonprofit CRMs must predict and customize each donor’s experience. Successful systems will combine tried-and-true fund-raising data analytics with social media signals and even current events to create a holistic, personalized relationship with each giver.

Giver-managed relationships.
Nonprofit CRMs must enable two-way communication and create open conversations with givers about the success of individual projects. Nonprofits can no longer report on cold institutional metrics.

Completely removing the “sales” paradigm. Nonprofit CRMs shouldn’t be modeled on sales/transactions. Instead, they should focus on long-term relationships around generosity, social engagement, advocacy, etc.

Open APIs and integrations. The days of monolithic donor management systems are over. Nonprofits want to use best-in-breed tools for email marketing, donation processing, etc. The new CRMs should embrace these choices and provide easy integration.

Increase efficiency and decrease overhead. Nonprofit CRMs must help reduce the unnecessary costs common to charities. Back-office tasks like donation importing, gift receipting, and foundation giving management can suck up hours of staff time and create massive overhead. The new CRM needs to understand the very specific needs of nonprofits and provide efficiency tools that allow charities to go about the work of accomplishing their mission.

I am sure there would be a lot of people cheering if the activities listed in his last point became much easier. Given that donor acknowledgment letters need to go out this month, it would probably move to the top of everyone’s wish list.

I had also been thinking that it might be useful to be able to record notes from every interaction whether it be phone call, face to face interactions, emails and social media. These things may already be possible in a way that doesn’t treat them as sales calls.

I wondered if any existing tool allowed you to record indirect signs of investment in your organization like people mentioning or tagging you on social media. Can you take screenshots of positive comments and electronically file them away?

I was a little leery at the mention of combining “fund-raising data analytics with social media signals.” That phrase made me wonder if he envisioned a system that tracked the social media activity of anyone who engaged with you and sent you tips noting what a person was passionate about. I could see that getting really stalker creepy fast.

On the other hand, if you have entered keywords into someone’s file regarding what they were passionate about and the system alerted you when a related topic was trending on social media, that might be okay. Or if the system collected keywords from the social media profiles of people who engaged with you and then spit out a report letting you know 58% of those people are passionate about animal rescue, Indian food and bluegrass music, that could also be help inform strategy development without feeling overly intrusive.

Are there any features on your wishlist you would love to see as part of a CRM package?

When Customer Relationship Management is Pull Rather Than Push

Monday night I went to the library to return a couple books. I had finished the second book in a series and wanted to read the third, but I had checked and knew the library didn’t have the third book. I went to the reference desk to see if I could request the book from another one in the state.

I was told the system to check if another library in the state had the book was down, but if I wanted, I could request that the library buy it. That way, I could have the book for a month rather than 2 weeks via interlibrary loan. Since I read quickly and didn’t want the library to buy a new book on my account, I said I would request the book via interlibrary loan during another visit.

This is where things got interesting.

The librarian decided to check if they had already ordered the book given that they had the first two volumes. She discovered that not only had they ordered the book in the last week, but my name had been flagged as a person to inform when the book came in based on my borrowing habits.

I left the library muttering under my breath that I really needed to start looking seriously at customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Here was a library serving a rural county of 78,000 whose services I use for free that had bought a book for me based on tracking my use of their services. (Yes, I suppose other people may have read the series too, but they ordered it right after I took out the second book so as far as I am concerned, they bought it for me.)

The way I see it, if they invest so much effort into serving a person who uses their services for free, how much disservice am I doing to my patrons who are paying me $30-$50 to see shows if I am not closely tracking their preferences and trying to figure out how to serve them better?

The way I see it, that last sentence there is a crucial one. There is a difference between the way Amazon uses software to track my activities in the interest of trying to sell me a book and the way the library tracks my activities in interest of buying a book for me.

While I would certainly use the software to suggest shows a person might be interested in seeing based on past history, I would also want to think about ways I could use data we collect to shape our programming to serve their interests.

[N.B. Well, I wrote this post on Monday evening knowing I wouldn’t have time to do so on Tuesday because we had a show. I just happened to see one of the librarians after the show and asked her what CRM system they used. She tapped her head.

Turns out, she had noticed what books I was taking out and order the third book in the series. I had specifically asked on Monday night if it were she that had ordered the book and was given an answer that made me think it was all tracked by software. This just goes to show that the best customer relationship software is caring employees paying attention and making notes.]

Customer, Know Thyself

I will admit that one problem of which I have often been aware is that it is difficult to make everyone at my theatre aware of the myriad forms of relationships different people have with us. Since there are some people who have been working for the theatre for 35 years, I am actually often less aware of a person’s history with the organization than some of the employees.

Chad Bauman tackles this very situation in an entry on his Arts Marketing blog. He relates a situation we have all probably been in: A person approaches our organization with a transaction they want to make. However, because their relationship with the organization doesn’t fit into the straightforward rules we have set down, they are not extended the courtesy accorded those less closely involved with the organization. Fortunately, someone who knows the value of the customer’s relationship with the organization is on hand and provides direction.

Bauman goes on to talk about the improvements they have made with their practices so that the communications and development departments are contributing to maintaining long term relationships with their constituency and community.

But in the course of his entry, I think he also ends up answering the question posed by the title of his entry – “Who are your best customers (and why many don’t know)?” He talks about how they replaced their old ticketing software for something with more integration and then hired someone else to write an algorithm that would alert their staff when they were speaking to someone with a high value relationship with the organization.

The best software certainly doesn’t mean anything if the practices of the organization don’t support the goal of cultivating and maintaining relationships with customers. However, I think the impediment to most organizations will be the need to pay to have someone write a custom program for them.

On the scale at which the Arena Stage operates, it makes good financial sense to have this done. The return on investment they have seen already with an increase in subscriptions and a decrease in churn probably justifies it. But will that be the case with most organizations?

That being said, I feel like I am woefully behind the curve trying to employ the customer relationship management (CRM) features with the ticketing and donor software we do use. In the sense that arts organizations aren’t using whatever resources are available, including integrating their daily practices toward a common goal, I would say Bauman is correct.

The thing is…it may be too late to pursue CRM. The trend is apparently heading in the opposite direction.

According to a articles Thomas Cott distributed the link to this past week, the government of the United Kingdom is strongly encouraging businesses to give control of customer data back to customers moving from customer relationship management to customer managed relationships.

Writes Tim Roberts:

In April this year, the UK Government launched a new consumer empowerment strategy “designed to encourage businesses to release their customer data back to them so that consumers can use this data for their own purposes.”

The Government has boasted that the ‘midata’ project will “turn the existing approach towards consumers on its head (with) a shift away from a world in which certain businesses tightly control the information they hold about consumers, towards one in which individuals along or in groups, can use their data or feedback for their own or mutual benefit“.

In the context of everyone’s worries about what Google will do with all the information it is collecting on you, this opens the possibility that we may actually find out what it is they know about us.

But it also occurred to me that while it may initially be frightening for people to learn what sort of profile has been synthesized about them, it may also prove illuminating if people came to realize their actual practices differed from their assumptions about themselves. For instance, they may attend shows every so many months not really considering themselves a fan of music as much as live theatre only to see that over the course of 5 years there is a record of them attending 12 concerts vs 5 plays. It might encourage people to be a little more open minded and adventuresome with their entertainment choices when they realize their tastes are more diverse than they realized.

In the other article quoting Alan Mitchell whose company has been advising the UK government says:

“And the second thing is that it is not only about a message going through to the customer, it is also that the organisation needs to be creating some sort of value in the information sharing – why should I share information with you? It is not just about receiving messages, it is about getting some sort of value from the process.”

When I shared my thoughts about the data contradicting people’s image of themselves with Drew McManus, he commented

“…think about all the box office and CRM solutions that require patrons to create accounts but provide next to zero outlet for patrons to do much with their user account besides update info. What sort of message does that send?”

Sharing that information would actually keep people more engaged and interested in your organization. It would probably also solve the problem of people creating multiple ticket accounts I groused about a couple months ago if they had a reason to use the same account for every interaction with your organization. Which means the organization has a much better sense of their relationship with the person since the history isn’t dispersed across multiple accounts.

CRM has been invaluable to companies because customers have had an expectation for decades now that if they patronize a place regularly, it will be acknowledged in some way whether it is the amount of starch in their shirts or the way they take their coffee. Even though CRM may be on its way out, many of the customer service practices it allowed companies to extend aren’t going away. Even if you have been behind the curve on using CRM software effectively (or at all) you still have an opportunity to participate in the next phase of relationship building.